For nearly sixty years, scholars have studied how information is selected, vetted, and shared by news organizations. The process, known as gatekeeping, is an enduring mass communications theory that describes the process by which news is gathered and filtered to audiences. It has been suggested, however, that in the wake of online communications the traditional function of media gatekeeping is changing. The infusion of citizen-gathered media into news programming is resulting in what some call a paradigm shift. As mainstream news outlets adopt and encourage public participation, it is important that researchers have a greater understanding of the theoretical implications related to participatory media and gatekeeping. This study will be among the first to examine the adoption of citizen journalism by a major cable news network. It will focus on CNN's citizen journalism online news community called iReport, which allows the public to share and submit "unfiltered" content. Vetted submissions that are deemed newsworthy can then be broadcasted across CNN's networks, and published on CNN.com. This journalism practice appears to follow the thoughts of Nguyen (2006), who states that, "future journalists will need to be trained to not only become critical gate-keepers but also act as listeners, discussion and forum leaders/mediators in an intimate interaction with their audiences." The goal of the paper is to lay a foundation for understanding how participatory media is utilized by a news network to help researchers possibly develop new models and hypotheses related to gatekeeping theory.

Automatic Face Recognition (AFR) can be useful in the forensic field when identifying people in surveillance footage. In AFR systems it is common to use deep neural networks which perform well if the quality of the images keeps a certain level. This is a problem when applying AFR on surveillance data since the quality of those images can be very poor. In this thesis the CNN FaceNet has been used to evaluate how different quality parameters influence the accuracy of the face recognition. The goal is to be able to draw conclusions about how to improve the recognition by using and avoiding certain parameters based on the conditions. Parameters that have been experimented with are angle of the face, image quality, occlusion, colour and lighting. This has been achieved by using datasets with different properties or by alternating the images. The parameters are meant to simulate different situations that can occur in surveillance footage that is difficult for the network to recognise. Three different models have been evaluated with different amount of embeddings and different training data. The results show that the two models trained on the VGGFace2 dataset performs much better than the one trained on CASIA-WebFace. All models performance drops on images with low quality compared to images with high quality because of the training data including mostly high-quality images. In some cases, the recognition results can be improved by applying some alterations in the images. This could be by using one frontal and one profile image when trying to identify a person or occluding parts of the shape of the face if it gets recognized as other persons with similar face shapes. One main improvement would be to extend the training datasets with more low-quality images. To some extent, this could be achieved by different kinds of data augmentation like artificial occlusion and down-sampled images.

The purpose of this study was to examine how Greta Thunberg, as a phenomenon, is portrayed in the news media Fox News as well as CNN and also how other actors are appearing in the news frames. The study was done by doing a qualitative content analysis in the form of a news framing analysis by focusing on frequent themes; frames by which she is portrayed. Furthermore I compared CNN with Fox News in relation to Greta Thunberg and how they portray her objectively. The examined articles were those of which they were published during the week when Greta Thunberg was named TIME’s ‘Person of the Year’. The frames, as a result, were that Greta Thunberg is framed as ‘A Hero’, ‘Someone to be questioned as Person of the Year’ and ‘A threat towards Donald Trump. The frequent actors apart from Greta Thunberg who appeared were Donald Trump as well as TIME’s Magazine. The results also found that Fox News and CNN takes different stands when it comes to Greta Thunberg.

This work researches named entity recognition (NER) with respect to images of documents with a domain-specific layout, by means of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Examples of such documents are receipts, invoices, forms and scientific papers, the latter of which are used in this work. An NER task is first performed statically, where a static number of entity classes is extracted per document. Networks based on the deep VGG-16 network are used for this task. Here, experimental evaluation shows that framing the task as a classification task, where the network classifies each bounding box coordinate separately, leads to the best network performance. Also, a multi-headed architecture is introduced, where the network has an independent fully-connected classification head per entity. VGG-16 achieves better performance with the multi-headed architecture than with its default, single-headed architecture. Additionally, it is shown that transfer learning does not improve performance of these networks. Analysis suggests that the networks trained for the static NER task learn to recognise document templates, rather than the entities themselves, and therefore do not generalize well to new, unseen templates. For a dynamic NER task, where the type and number of entity classes vary per document, experimental evaluation shows that, on large entities in the document, the Faster R-CNN object detection framework achieves comparable performance to the networks trained on the static task. Analysis suggests that Faster R-CNN generalizes better to new templates than the networks trained for the static task, as Faster R-CNN is trained on local features rather than the full document template. Finally, analysis shows that Faster R-CNN performs poorly on small entities in the image and suggestions are made to improve its performance.

We investigated the advantage of combining RGB images with depth data to get more robust object classifications and detections using pre-trained deep convolutional neural networks. We relied upon the raw images from publicly available datasets captured using Microsoft Kinect cameras. The raw images varied in size, and therefore required resizing to fit our network. We designed a resizing method called "bleeding edge" to avoid distorting the objects in the images. We present a novel method of interpolating the missing depth pixel values by comparing to similar RGB values. This method proved superior to the other methods tested. We showed that a simple colormap transformation of the depth image can provide close to state-of-art performance. Using our methods, we can present state-of-art performance on the Washington Object dataset and we provide some results on the Washington Scenes (V1) dataset. Specifically, for the detection, we used contours at different thresholds to find the likely object locations in the images. For the classification task we can report state-of-art results using only RGB and RGB-D images, depth data alone gave close to state-of-art results. For the detection task we found the RGB only detector to be superior to the other detectors.

Objectives: Development of accurate auditory attention decoding (AAD) algorithms, capable of identifying the attended sound source from the speech evoked electroencephalography (EEG) responses, could lead to new solutions for hearing impaired listeners: neuro-steered hearing aids. Many of the existing AAD algorithms are either inaccurate or very slow. Therefore, there is a need to develop new EEG-based AAD methods. The first objective of this project was to investigate deep neural network (DNN) models for AAD and compare them to the state-of-the-art linear models. The second objective was to investigate whether generative adversarial networks (GANs) could be used for speech-evoked EEGdata augmentation to improve the AAD performance. Design: The proposed methods were tested in a dataset of 34 participants who performed an auditory attention task. They were instructed to attend to one of the two talkers in the front and ignore the talker on the other side and back-ground noise behind them, while high density EEG was recorded. Main Results: The linear models had an average attended vs ignored speech classification accuracy of 95.87% and 50% for ∼30 second and 8 seconds long time windows, respectively. A DNN model designed for AAD resulted in an average classification accuracy of 82.32% and 58.03% for ∼30 second and 8 seconds long time windows, respectively, when trained only on the real EEG data. The results show that GANs generated relatively realistic speech-evoked EEG signals. A DNN trained with GAN-generated data resulted in an average accuracy 90.25% for 8 seconds long time windows. On shorter trials the GAN-generated EEG data have shown to significantly improve classification performances, when compared to models only trained on real EEG data. Conclusion: The results suggest that DNN models can outperform linear models in AAD tasks, and that GAN-based EEG data augmentation can be used to further improve DNN performance. These results extend prior work and brings us closer to the use of EEG for decoding auditory attention in next-generation neuro-steered hearing aids.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Every year the most effective Deep learning models, CNN architectures are showcased based on their compatibility and performance on the embedded edge hardware, especially for applications like image classification. These deep learning models necessitate a significant amount of computation and memory, so they can only be used on high-performance computing systems like CPUs or GPUs. However, they often struggle to fulfill portable specifications due to resource, energy, and real-time constraints. Hardware accelerators have recently been designed to provide the computational resources that AI and machine learning tools need. These edge accelerators have high-performance hardware which helps maintain the precision needed to accomplish this mission. Furthermore, this classification dilemma that investigates channel interdependencies using either depth-wise or group-wise convolutional features, has benefited from the inclusion of Bottleneck modules. Because of its increasing use in portable applications, the classic inverted residual block, a well-known architecture technique, has gotten more recognition. This work takes it a step forward by introducing a design method for porting CNNs to lowresource embedded systems, essentially bridging the difference between deep learning models and embedded edge systems. To achieve these goals, we use closer computing strategies to reduce the computer’s computational load and memory usage while retaining excellent deployment efficiency. This thesis work introduces HBONext, a mutated version of Harmonious Bottlenecks (DHbneck) combined with a Flipped version of Inverted Residual (FIR), which outperforms the current HBONet architecture in terms of accuracy and model size miniaturization. Unlike the current definition of inverted residual, this FIR block performs identity mapping and spatial transformation at its higher dimensions. The HBO solution, on the other hand, focuses on two orthogonal dimensions: spatial (H/W) contraction-expansion and later channel (C) expansion-contraction, which are both organized in a bilaterally symmetric manner. HBONext is one of those versions that was designed specifically for embedded and mobile applications. In this research work, we also show how to use NXP Bluebox 2.0 to build a real-time HBONext image classifier. The integration of the model into this hardware has been a big hit owing to the limited model size of 3 MB. The model was trained and validated using CIFAR10 dataset, which performed exceptionally well due to its smaller size and higher accuracy. The validation accuracy of the baseline HBONet architecture is 80.97%, and the model is 22 MB in size. The proposed architecture HBONext variants, on the other hand, gave a higher validation accuracy of 89.70% and a model size of 3.00 MB measured using the number of parameters. The performance metrics of HBONext architecture and its various variants are compared in the following chapters.

For some time now, the fashion industry has been a big contributor to humanity's carbon emissions. If we are to become a more sustainable society and cut down on our pollution, this industry needs to be reformed. The clothes we wear must be reused to a greater extent than today. Unfortunately, a big part of the Swedish population experiences a lack of available items on the second-hand market. This paper presents a proof-of-concept application that could be a possible solution. The application scans online second-hand websites and separates composite ads into new, separate, ads. This makes it easier for potential buyers to find the items they are looking for. The application uses a web scraper written in Java combined with a convolutional neural network for classification. The CNN is a modified version of the ResNet50 model which is trained on a dataset collected from a Swedish second-hand site. At the moment the network supports 5 types of clothing with an accuracy of 86%. Tests were performed to investigate the potential of scaling up the model. These experiments were made using a 3rd party dataset called deepFashion. This dataset consists of over 800,000 images of clothes in different settings. The tests indicate that given a larger dataset the model could handle up to 31 classes with an accuracy of at least 57% and possibly as high as 76%. This evolved model did not produce any meaning full results when tested on real second-hand images since the deepFashion network mostly consists of clothes worn by models. Further research could see this application evolve into one that could sort ads on not only type, but colour, material and other properties to provide even more exhaustive labels.

Background: Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) is particularly useful for novice driversand self-driving cars. Driver Assistance Systems(DAS) involves automatic trafficsign recognition. Efficient classification of the traffic signs is required in DAS andunmanned vehicles for safe navigation. Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN) isknown for establishing promising results in the field of image classification, whichinspired us to employ this technique in our thesis. Computer vision is a process thatis used to understand the images and retrieve data from them. OpenCV is a Pythonlibrary used to detect traffic sign images in real-time. Objectives: This study deals with an experiment to build a CNN model which canclassify the traffic signs in real-time effectively using OpenCV. The model is builtwith low computational cost. The study also includes an experiment where variouscombinations of parameters are tuned to improve the model’s performance. Methods: The experimentation method involve building a CNN model based onmodified LeNet architecture with four convolutional layers, two max-pooling layersand two dense layers. The model is trained and tested with the German Traffic SignRecognition Benchmark (GTSRB) dataset. Parameter tuning with different combinationsof learning rate and epochs is done to improve the model’s performance.Later this model is used to classify the images introduced to the camera in real-time. Results: The graphs depicting the accuracy and loss of the model before and afterparameter tuning are presented. An experiment is done to classify the traffic signimage introduced to the camera by using the CNN model. High probability scoresare achieved during the process which is presented. Conclusions: The results show that the proposed model achieved 95% model accuracywith an optimum number of epochs, i.e., 30 and default optimum value oflearning rate, i.e., 0.001. High probabilities, i.e., above 75%, were achieved when themodel was tested using new real-time data.

Energy efficiency of district heating systems is of great interest to energy stakeholders. However, it is not uncommon that district heating systems fail to achieve the expected performance due to inappropriate operations. Night setback is one control strategy, which has been proved to be not a suitable setting for well-insulated modern buildings in terms of both economic and energy efficiency. Therefore, identification of a night setback control is vital to district heating companies to smoothly manage their heat energy distribution to their customers. This study is motivated to automate this identification process. The method used in this thesis is a Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) approach using the concept of transfer learning. 133 substations in Oslo are used in this case study to design a machine learning model that can identify a substation as night setback or non-night setback series. The results show that the proposed method can classify the substations with approximately 97% accuracy and 91% F1-score. This shows that the proposed method has a high potential to be deployed and used in practice to identify a night setback control in district heating substations.